


Sea Change

by bmouse



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: And also a drama queen, Future Peace AU, M/M, Megs is LHP as he was meant to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:55:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26260750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: Megatron is bitten by a distant relative. Optimus is an eldritch Disney princess.
Relationships: Megatron/Optimus Prime
Comments: 19
Kudos: 114





	Sea Change

**Author's Note:**

> I was at the ocean last week and this happened. Could be in a generic 'Work it out you two, FFS!' Future Peace AU or in my little 'Sea of Tranquility' side project, give or take like 200 years.

In the shallows at the edge of the shoal, with the planet’s suns sinking picturesquely down to the horizon, Optimus saw Megatron flinch. 

“Are you alright?” He queried.

“Well at last this is a proper solvent sea,” the warlord grumbled “not like that saline Earth nonsense. However-”

He raised one of his massive forearms out of the liquid - at the edge closest to his wrist joint a young sharkticon had gamely bitten into the plating and now thrashed in confusion, unable to free itself.

“-the occupants have more ambition than sense.” 

“ _Oh._ ” Optimus said, “It would seem you have encountered a relative.” 

He would have been more concerned, but it was obvious that the poor thing had hardly penetrated even the outermost layer of the warlord’s armor and had earned itself nothing but a sore jaw. 

Megatron snorted, simultaneously blowing a series of bubbles out of his shin vents.

Then he got a sly look in his optics.

“ _Hark! Here I see my countrified batchmate, freshly flown from the outer reaches of the polity and so used to dining on glitchbats on the wing that he once used a cube as soaking bath for his pedes instead of drinking-_ “

He began to declaim in his raspy bass, gesturing dramatically with his arm, the poor sharkticon flopping to and fro as he recited a monologue from “The Uncommon Amica,” a comedy-of-manners from the Golden Age. 

Helplessly, Optimus Prime began to laugh. 

He was up to his midsegments in solvent and the shaking of his frame created waves which lapped over his windshields and sent droplets high enough to drip off the ends of his finials and silver his cheek.

“Enough, enough. Let the poor thing go.” he managed to say eventually, after a vocalizer reboot.

Megatron took his bows, brow segments raised.

“Surely you must be talking to the sharkticon?” He struck a pose. “Observe, as I soldier on though my suffering! I would have made the silvered stage of the Iaconian theater as much mine own as the Arena! If they’d given me half the chance.”

Optimus hid a grin behind a primly curled servo. 

“Of that, I have no doubt.”

Megatron looked out on the horizon, his brief mechanimal attachment seemingly forgotten even though the motor of its serrated jaw was still revving half-heartedly.

“You sent me that play, didn’t you.”

“Yes.” The Prime nodded, a faraway look in his optics, “And, as I recall, that was one of the few times I was caught and reprimanded.”

“Ah, so slipping your Pitspawn friends harlequins and two-shanix dreadfuls was overlooked, but Primus forbid the rabble have access to _culture_.”

“I believe that _was_ the rather hypocritical policy.”

Seeing that his nemesis-slash-amica was distracted by brooding over past injustices, Optimus deftly stepped closer and, crooning something in Primal vernacular to the confused creature, applied gentle pressure to the well-oiled hinge of its jaw to compel it to let go of its oversized and inedible prey.

Megatron hardly noticed, he was lost in thought. It had certainly been easy to pretend that his early involvement with the Decepticons had cost Archivist Pax little in his relatively privileged mid-caste life.

But there _had_ very likely been missed promotions, reprimands, and punishments. He wondered how much Orion had kept from him, how much he had never thought to ask...

The sharkticon dropped back into the bay with an indignant static burble. It circled around them, bumping it’s blunt head every now and then against Optimus’ thighs in a futile quest for either vengeance or fuel. 

“You’d better not, _scraplet_.” Megatron growled down at it in warning, “Those are for _me_.”

Smiling gently, Optimus pulled an unrefined Energon crystal out of his subspace and holding it aloft momentarily in both servos, dropped it into the water.

The sharkticon darted in and swallowed it whole, gears already beginning to grind in the back of its intake. 

Megatron _tsk_ -ed. 

“Softsparked fool, now we’ll get a swarm of them.”

They did.

Shortly the little pest returned with a somehow even smaller sibling, their carrier following warily. This was a creature nearly the length of Megatron’s pede, scarred and mottled enough that it had clearly been doggedly swimming and surviving through ages of pollution, emptiness, war. 

Megatron, who had honestly been thinking of catching his little challenger and biting it _back_ , respectfully reconsidered.

Optimus fed each of the creatures, dropping crystals of corresponding size, still with that ritualistic gesture. Even as others surfaced and swam closer, nearly thirteen of them in all, their blue and gray hides making long shadows against the crushed gypsum sand.

Miraculously, they all waited their turn.

Less miraculously and perhaps more supernaturally. Optimus’ optics were over-bright in the twilight. Light shone in between his seams and refracted through the water. 

_‘I go to berth with Primus’ night-light.’_ Megatron thought wryly, perhaps to distract himself from the fact that he went to berth clutching a living fragment of his god. 

In fact, the Prime’s EM field pulsed in an ancient prayer sequence. Something wordless and old that his Protector’s protocols couldn’t help but decode as a blessing to the sea, a covenant of renewed bounty.

Swarmed by his admirers, delicate digits trustingly flared open Optimus looked ethereal the way no enormous warframe should have managed. And beautiful. And, as he looked back, a little chagrined.

Aha. Well, even Primely powers could not create Energon from nothing. 

Megatron had already prepared a speech on a certain old foe’s ridiculous self-abnegating tendencies but, in the end, he had to content himself with just his prior monologue. Truthfully, he lasted all of a nanoklik under that entreating gaze before drawing a servo-full of crystals out of his own stores and passing them over.

He could spare it. His emergency supply was always overstocked these days and vorns of peace had trained the Champion of Kaon to kindness now and then. Not even altogether unwillingly. 

(Besides, if he didn’t he wouldn’t put it past Optimus to open one of his own fuel lines. _That_ was certainly gristly enough to have been part of the old tradition.)

Perhaps this was just payment for the snippet of these creatures’ code that long ago he’d taken and integrated into himself for his sharp, ever-renewing denta.

“Thank you, my Lord.” Optimus said, smiling and radiant. 

Megatron kissed him, shuttering his optics against the brightness. _These_ sharp hungry things might also be drawn to the light, but _he_ alone possessed it.

Around them, the sharkticons circled, Primus’ warning and benediction both. 

~


End file.
